A man for all seasons

Someone arriving today on the job market in Brussels might regard Klaus Van der Pas as a relic of a bygone age.

In some ways, he is indeed from a lost civilisation. He began working for the European Commission in 1963, when there were just six member states – the founding countries. Born in Munich in 1943, he grew up in the Netherlands and began work for the Commission in The Hague, as an information official. At the beginning of June, after a mere 43 years of service, he retired just short of his 66th birthday.

Dramatic changes

Van der Pas is acutely conscious of how the EU of today is different from the European Economic Community of 1963. Indeed, he has been witness to some of the most dramatic changes. In his early years he was something of a specialist in the workings of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In the 1970s he was a spokesman for successive agriculture commissioners. The CAP of today is different, much-reformed and may even be simpler.

In 1995, Van der Pas became spokesman to Jacques Santer, the then president of the Commission and took the decision to introduce English into the press room, alongside French. It was a step that some (French) observers still regard as the beginning of the end.

Enlargement

Before that, he had been director of the Commission’s enlargement taskforce and he subsequently became the first director-general for enlargement – a post that he had to move from when Günter Verheugen, his compatriot, became the commissioner for enlargement. (Commission rules would not allow commissioner and director-general to be of the same nationality.) So he has lived through – and assisted in – the expansion of the EU from those original six states to 27.

Most of all, Van der Pas has seen a change in the Commission’s status. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, he remarks, the Commission had “heroic stature”. It had brought peace, it was bringing down borders. That perception of the Commission has, he readily recognises, changed. The Commission is now widely seen as bureaucratic and too big. It is perceived as far removed from citizens and it struggles to get credit and recognition from public opinion, or even from its partners in the member states.

Van der Pas has lived through that change, not least during his time as spokesman to Santer, though he was no longer the spokesman when Santer and his commissioners were obliged to resign early in 1999.

Different environment

Van der Pas recognises that those working in the Commission today are confronted by a changed environment. Commission initiatives have to pass a test of necessity that was not applied 30 years ago. Partly that is because there is no longer a shared assumption that Commission policy is striving for the general good. Partly that is because some Commission proposals – for instance, in taxation, in health, in justice and home affairs, are in areas that are much more controversial than in the past.

From bottom to top

In other respects though, Van der Pas’s experience does not conflict with the expectations of a new arrival on the job market.

In the first place, he is something of a paragon of upward mobility during a Commission career. He started out without a university degree, as what was in old terms a ‘C’ grade, but acquired qualifications on the way and rose to the most senior ranks of the administration as director-general for education and culture and then for employment and social affairs.

Secondly, he does not publicly lament some lost bygone era. He is supportive of some changes made by the current Commission President José Manuel Barroso that others bemoan. The tendency to centralise, the necessity for the president to set priorities, the reduced room for manoeuvre of individual commissioners (and the senior officials under them) – these he regards as unavoidable.

Thirdly, he is very positive about the quality of young people now applying for jobs in the EU institutions. The less generous terms of employment that were introduced at the time of the EU’s 2004 enlargement have not discernibly harmed the quality of applications, he says.

EU enthusiast

Indeed, he is still, after all this years, an enthusiast for a career in the EU institutions.

“You are always invited to take the high moral ground, to do something that is good for Europe that cannot be achieved at the national level. It is fantastic,” he says.

He says: “If you come into the job with the sort of convictions I had, it is the only career to have.”